Sanders, Trump and the US working class

Megan Trudell

“The best president in the history of the world—somebody courageous, smart, bold—that person will not be able to address the major crises that we face unless there is a mass political movement, unless there’s a political revolution in this country”. So Bernie Sanders told his audience at a meeting in New Hampshire in June 2015.1 Whatever the outcome of the nomination process later this year, Sanders’s “political revolution” represents something significant in electoral politics in the United States—the intrusion into the mainstream of the ideas and demands of the political movements that have emerged over the past five years.

The Sanders campaign has focused on the chasm between rich and poor in the US—“There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent”. Sanders has attacked Wall Street and called for the break-up of the largest banks and financial institutions, the creation of decent paying jobs, an end to crippling college tuition fees, for the expansion of Medicare and social security, for racial justice, action on climate change, an end to the domination of the electoral process by big money and the “restoration” of democracy in politics. Irrespective of his ability to deliver such a programme, this is a serious recognition of the concerns of millions of ordinary Americans and a recognition of the way the wind is blowing in US society—a novelty in US electoral politics.

Describing himself as a democratic socialist, Sanders has tapped into fundamental social democratic desires and aspirations that have been voiced through political movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter (BLM). He has gained enthusiastic support from younger voters in particular, winning 81 percent of the votes of 18-29 year olds in Michigan’s Democratic primary, for example, and—as his victory over Hillary Clinton in Michigan shows—pulling important sections of the US working class. In a country where vast sums of money are key to political election, and in a campaign in which the 100 top billionaire spenders have donated a combined $195 million to support other presidential candidates, Sanders’s average campaign contribution is $27. He has received a stunning 3.5 million individual donations, adding a further $5 million from 175,000 contributors after his surprise win in Michigan.

The most striking element of his campaign so far is his insistence that his candidature is part of a movement. Here Sanders voices a reality of 21st century capitalism—that demands that were deliverable by government before the Second World War now require a radical reconfiguration of society to be achieved, and those making the demands are by and large outside the political class:

We aren’t going to get there just by electing a president who believes in and is committed to restoring our democracy. We’re going to get there by building a movement—a movement with enough power not only to elect a president but to insist that all of our elected representatives return power to the people, a movement that not only identifies the deep corruption of our politics but rejects cynicism and instead insists on solutions, action and accountability.2

The Sanders presidential campaign isn’t the first to build on and express political movements in the US. Ralph Nader did so (as an independent and for the Green Party) in several elections from 2000 onwards in the wake of the Seattle anti-capitalist protests—but the base of support for radical ideas that Sanders is tapping into has broadened from the start of the century. This is in part a result of the national and international impact of political movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, as well as climate change campaigns, immigrant rights protests and the anti-war movement, but is crucially related to the recession of 2009 and the cumulative weight of deeper underlying changes in US capitalism over the past 40 years—the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of billionaires, the increasing class polarisation of US society and the rapacious destruction of people’s lives and environments.

This time, of course, Sanders is not standing as an independent as Nader did, so the prospects of the emergence of a third party that existed 15 years ago are more remote. Sanders standing as a Democrat is a mixed offering: on the one hand, as many on the US left have pointed out, his candidature therefore risks trapping the aspirations of the social movements within the Democratic Party machine, and the party has a long history of co-opting the energy and hopes of social movements. Indeed, one of the criticisms of the civil rights generation from BLM activists has been precisely that—its incorporation into establishment politics that then disarmed it in a fight to protect the gains of the 1960s. On the other hand, however, at this stage Sanders’ campaign, precisely because it is taking place within the Democratic Party, is bringing the external crisis home to the institution and exposing the rifts and weaknesses in the Democrats’ electoral base.

Sanders himself was criticised by BLM activists early in the campaign for not prioritising racial justice, but he has done significantly more than Clinton to speak directly to those concerns. He has, since last summer, unequivocally stated repeatedly and publicly that “Black Lives Matter”. He has denounced Sandra Bland’s death in police custody in 2015, expressing outrage at police violence and murder of black people and calling for the reform of the criminal justice system. No other candidate has done so and some of his critics have recognised this shift. So Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, draws a clear distinction between Sanders and Clinton:

Recognising that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic. Sanders opposed the 1996 welfare-reform law. He also opposed bank deregulation and the Iraq War, both of which Hillary supported, and both of which have proved disastrous. In short, there is such a thing as a lesser evil, and Hillary is not it.3

Clearly, Sanders’s statement that he would endorse Clinton if he loses and not campaign against her as an independent represents a weakness. The danger is that Clinton will, if nominated, co-opt his support on an “Anybody But Trump” basis and the social movements will end up behind a candidate who represents all the vested interests that Sanders rails against. In part this is a weakness of Sanders and in part a weakness of the social movements such as Occupy and BLM. Impressive and important as they have been, they have not yet been able to pose a united, independent alternative to politics as usual in the US. Nonetheless, Sanders’s articulation of the rage and frustration of millions of Americans over inequality, lack of political democracy, racism and injustice is tremendously significant and reveals the fractures in the party machine’s ability to keep control of its supporters. Quantitative changes in economic structures and the effects of such on society, communities and living conditions are creating and combining with a rejection of the status quo on the part of large numbers of people to exert pressure on the key institutions in US society—and it is this that needs to be grasped by all those interested in the possibilities for radical change in the US.

Here, one frequent criticism of Sanders—with echoes of some responses to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader—is that he is not really a socialist, and if elected will become part of the machine and will therefore sell out his supporters who are looking for fundamental change. But whether or not Sanders really is a democratic socialist (he isn’t. In US terms, he is a New Deal social liberal who approves of the social democratic model in parts of Europe) is simply not the interesting or important point. He is expressing the hopes and aspirations of a radicalised generation, is articulating and legitimising discussion of collective political action to achieve social change, has helped to rehabilitate the word “socialism” in the US—no small thing in a country with a long anti-Communist tradition and one in which 30 years ago Michael Dukakis was very effectively denounced by George Bush Senior as a “liberal”—and has moved the debate about wealth inequality, social insecurity and class into the mainstream. This development provides an opportunity for the left to insert itself into the debate about socialism in the US in a way that has not been seen in decades. Canadian socialist David McNally has quite rightly posed the questions that really matter about the lessons of the Sanders phenomenon:

What is going on when we see a surge of mass support for someone who identifies himself (however inaccurately) with socialism? What is the social process driving this unexpected shift in political goals and ideas toward the left? What lies behind the re-entry of socialism into the mass vocabulary of political life? What openings might this signal for radical socialism in the age of austerity?… Real truth, Hegel argued, grasps the process of becoming of things, rather than resorting to trivial statements of fact. Truth is concerned not with static statements (Sanders does not equal socialism), but with “the coming to be” of dynamic processes—with their “dialectical movement”.4

And Sanders’s programme is extremely popular. He has beaten Clinton in Colorado, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Vermont. Sanders rallies have pulled enormous numbers—in October 2015 he spoke to 25,000 in Boston (the previous record for a Democratic primary rally was Barack Obama’s 10,000), in March, some 9,000 attended a rally in Tampa, Florida and thousands queued in Chicago for hours to hear him. In smaller towns he has regularly attracted a quarter to a third of the population to meetings. Sanders’s agenda clearly has an appeal that is much wider than the radical left. There are obvious reasons for this: “Beginning in the 1990s, the Democratic Party pivoted away from policies directed specifically at the working class. More recently, income inequality has skyrocketed, as the high-tech revolution has left behind industrial workers and many middle class professionals.”5

Michigan has been the most important victory so far for Sanders—putting him decidedly back in the game after Super Tuesday (1 March), in which Clinton dominated—and is significant as a “rust-belt” industrial state in which Clinton was generally expected to win comfortably. Importantly, Sanders won more black voters away from Clinton than was the case in the earlier Southern primaries, and his central message that she had supported trade deals that lost US jobs resonated with enough voters to pull the state to him on a high turnout. The Michigan result is a major problem for Clinton:

A majority of Democrats and Republicans in Michigan have reported that recent trade deals have given people like them the shaft. On the Democratic side, six in 10 Michigan voters thought trade takes away jobs and the majority of those voters supported Sanders; on the Republican side, four in 10 thought trade costs the country jobs, and the majority of them supported Trump. Sanders’s and Trump’s big wins in Michigan tonight, and those polling numbers in particular, should have Clinton very, very afraid.6

That victory wasn’t repeated in Ohio, though Sanders came close enough there, and in Illinois and North Carolina, to stay in the game. And it’s good news that he is fighting on—most crucially because the longer his campaign inspires, pulls together and organises workers and activists in a very different way than the norm, the more likely that change is to make a significant impact on the next presidency—whoever wins. For example, the contrast between the top down Clinton campaign and Sanders’s grassroots organisation is striking. One important indicator of this is the way that union members have voted. Despite having the endorsement of only a handful of national unions compared with Clinton, “In a stark illustration of his argument that revolutionary political change can only come from below, a growing number of local union chapters are choosing to ignore their national leadership and back Sanders on the ground instead”.7

In every major union that has let its members decide on who the union endorses, Sanders has won. In every union where the leadership has decided, the endorsement has gone to Clinton. This speaks volumes about the divide between the Democratic elite and the party’s supporters. As one electrician and union organiser in Indiana described,

I don’t know that there’s any grassroots excitement in Hillary Clinton. I think leaders in Washington bought in that she was inevitable, electable and there wouldn’t be a credible challenger. But the grassroots interest in Bernie Sanders is because of who Bernie Sanders is and what he’s stood for all these years. He’s been on our picket lines. He believes in what he’s proposing and has had the same views for 25 or more years… He’s better on issues and more in line with workers. So why wouldn’t we support him? Why her and not him when he’s so much better?8

Polling by the right-wing Republican Frank Luntz shows:

A year ahead of the presidential election, the American public is deeply cynical about government, politics and the nation’s elected leaders in a way that has become quite familiar. Currently, just 19 percent say they can trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest levels in the past half-century. Only 20 percent would describe government programmes as being well-run. And elected officials are held in such low regard that 55 percent of the public says “ordinary Americans” would do a better job of solving national problems.9

More specifically, among younger voters in the US, Sanders is by far the preferred candidate. In a poll of 18-26 year olds, Luntz’s organisation found that Sanders was the political figure respondents liked and respected the most (31 percent to Obama’s 18 percent and Hillary Clinton’s 11 percent).10 Asked about what they considered to be the most compassionate economic and social system,

an overwhelming 58 percent chose “socialism” over “capitalism” (33 percent)… By a 2-1 margin, young voters see compassion in collectivism, not capitalism. An almost identical 66 percent think that corporate America “embodies everything that is wrong with America”, compared to just 34 percent who say that it’s what’s “right” with America. [Note to any politicians who are reading this: you’re no better off. Sixty percent say Washington embodies what’s wrong with America, too. Only 40 percent say it embodies what’s right].

And his conclusion? “The hostility of young Americans to the underpinnings of the American economy and the American government ought to frighten every business and political leader as much as they excite activists for Sanders”.11

The popularity of Sanders’s message among the young has drawn comparisons with Jeremy Corbyn’s election to the Labour Party leadership in Britain. And there are similar processes driving both developments. Even Tony Blair, in an interview in which (reading from the same script as Hillary Clinton) he admitted being “baffled” by the rise of Sanders and Corbyn because they don’t espouse “pragmatic” election-winning politics, could grasp that part of the explanation “is the flatlining of lower and middle income people, the flatlining in living standards for those people, which is very frustrating. It’s partly an anger for sure at the elites, a desire to choose people who are going to rattle the cage”.12 It is obviously beyond Blair’s capacity to understand that the popularity of Sanders and Corbyn is also, centrally, about a positive rejection of deepening class inequality, a rejection of the domination of the market in education and health and an outlet for collective aspirations for an equal, sustainable future, together with—crucially—the confidence that such a world is possible. Guardian columnist Owen Jones has written that what drives youth support for Sanders and Corbyn is despair. But that’s a bit wide of the mark; defiance and a desire for change would be better ways to describe the motivations of many supporters of both politicians. Certainly in the US, evidence is that young people are angry, but far from despairing. Luntz writes,

In the eight years since the financial meltdown, my company has extensively researched the opinions, fears and hopes of Americans in the post-collapse world. Time after time, and year after year, voters told us the same bottom line conclusion: they were increasingly worried their children would inherit a worse future than they did, from their own parents. And frankly, they felt horrible about it—like they were violating the most sacred American promise, which is that you leave something better for the next generation. Yet these newly minted voters and those back for round two of presidential voting are shouting right back, “Don’t worry about us! We got this.” For them, hope, change and optimism aren’t political buzzwords. They’re real, because that’s exactly what they expect for themselves and their generation.13

Critically, that defiance and courage will likely be the backbone of any anti-racist, anti-Trump campaign. To telescope developments in the US to a simple “the Democrats will sell out and incorporate the movement to derail it” underestimates the movements and the transformations driving them, but also misses the boost that the Sanders campaign is giving to their energy and dynamism. So, for example, a rally for Trump scheduled for 11 March in Chicago had to be called off “amid scenes of violence and chaos unparalleled in the recent history of American political campaigning… Fights and scuffles broke out as protesters swapped blows with Trump supporters and activists eager to celebrate their apparent victory shouted ‘Bernie, Bernie’ and ‘Si se puede’ (‘Yes we can’), while waving signs supporting the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders”.14

Trump

Sanders is not, of course, the only novel element of the 2016 election. The ­billionaire Donald Trump is thus far decimating his Republican rivals and stoking racism and xenophobia—including calling for a wall to be built between the US and Mexico to keep immigrants out and refusing to condemn Ku Klux Klan members who attended his rallies in the South. And the South is key to Trump’s usurping of the Republican elite. The Republican Party, like the Democratic Party but more so, is engulfed in a major internal crisis that is the direct result of its pandering to right-wing conservatives in recent decades and the incremental shift of its power base to the South.

Fifty-seven percent of Trump’s delegates come from his sweep of six Southern states. Donald Trump won 60 percent of the delegates so far awarded by Southern states. Of the nine state primaries outside of the South, Trump lost five. Southerners are an increasingly vital component of the [Republican] base—making up for losses out west, in the mountain states, the Northeast, and the Midwest. The Southern states have a bigger say in the [Republican Party] as a result—and they are wielding it.15

The space given to the reactionary right by the Republican party elite in an attempt to pull back support after Obama’s two election wins—riding on, and indulging, the popularity of the Tea Party and the shock-jock-Christian-right “culture wars” of the 2004 election before it—means that, as Socialist Worker in the US argued, “if Republican Party leaders are recoiling in horror now that Trump stands a good chance of becoming their presidential nominee, they have only themselves to blame… Now, Trump is threatening to permanently damage the image of the first party of American capitalism—but the party establishment can’t figure out how to control him, and especially his supporters”.16

Trump is attempting to legitimate racism, nationalism and scapegoating and those arguments are clearly falling on fertile ground to some extent. An ­investigation into Trump supporters in The Atlantic magazine found:

What set them apart from other Republicans was their economic insecurity and the intensity of their economic nationalism. Sixty-three percent of Trump supporters wished to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born on US soil—a dozen points higher than the norm for all Republicans. More than other Republicans, Trump supporters distrusted Barack Obama as alien and dangerous: Only 21 percent acknowledged that the president was born in the United States… Sixty-six percent believed the president was a Muslim.17

Trump’s anti-immigration, racist rhetoric—vile as it is—is not the full picture, any more than the Christian moral message was in the 2004 George W Bush campaign or the less religious, more libertarian, Tea Party rhetoric was in 2010.18 Rather, it is his merging of hysteria over immigration with trade protectionism that is giving him traction: “Trump has struck a chord among a pinched conservative working class electorate that knows free trade and globalisation are not about to boost their wages, or bring their pensions back. He’s also tapped into the protectionist outlook of America’s older labour movement, which historically supported restrictions on immigration because of its downward pull on wages”.19

Although Trump represents the logical extension of those previous incursions into the Republican machine’s control over the party, Trump’s supporters are not primarily the religious right or libertarians, and neither are they the wealthy. A recent YouGov poll showed that half of his Republican party supporters are poorly educated, only 19 percent have a college or post-college degree. Some 38 percent earned less than $50,000 and only 11 percent earned more than $100,000. Ideologically, only 13 percent said they were very conservative, with 19 percent describing themselves as moderate. Nor were they highly religious by Republican standards.20 The lack of appeal to the religious right is behind Trump’s successful wooing of Ben Carson, the evangelist candidate in the Republican race who dropped out in early March.

There are, of course, glaring contradictions in working class voters supporting Trump. For all his attacks on free trade agreements that are perceived as having taken US jobs Trump is also loudly declaring that US wages are too high, not something many US workers would agree with since wages have stagnated for 40 years. Incidentally, most of the rust belt jobs that were massacred in the Clinton and Bush years were relocated to the South, rather than abroad. By mid-2006, 200,000 car workers out of 560,000 were employed in the South, which has much lower rates of unionisation, lower wages and a concentration of migrants without papers working low wage jobs.

Another facet of Trump’s success is that he is performing strongly among Republican-leaning Democrats. In a peculiarity of US electoral politics, voters registered with one party can vote in the other party’s primaries, and Trump’s support is based largely in the South, Appalachia and the industrial North—areas where the Democrats have lost a lot of their base over the past 40 or so years and where many registered Democrats have abandoned the party in presidential elections during the Obama years. As I wrote in this journal in 2006:

During the 1990s the “New Democrats” heavily punished their working class base. Clinton promised healthcare for all, but the number of Americans without health insurance increased by 8 million between 1995 and 2000, from 37 to 45 million. Clinton continued neoliberal policies, signing up to NAFTA, slashing welfare and abandoning federal assistance to the old industrial “heartland” in favour of the computer and information industries in the South and West.21

A recent article in The Nation outlines Trump’s potential to make inroads into Democrat support, especially if Clinton is the eventual nominee:

Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry warns that Trump could win a good many union votes—and perhaps the presidency—if he secures the Republican nod… “I think he’s touching this vein of terrible anxiety that working class people feel about their current status, but more importantly, how terrified they are for their kids not being able to do as well as they have, never mind doing better”. Henry noted that internal polls of union members across the country reveal a “broken sense of the future” and raise the prospect of an emotion-driven election in which it is “easier [to] appeal to fear than to what’s possible”.22

The stoking of racism and anti-immigration feeling should not be underestimated, but it is also important to bear in mind that, for most Americans, these are not vote-winning ideas in and of themselves. A 2015 Pew Research Center poll found that more, rather than fewer, Americans supported equal rights than a year previously—around 60 percent of Americans believed continued change is necessary to give blacks equal rights with whites:

This marks a substantial increase from 2014, when public opinion was much more closely divided. Underlying that majority is a significant racial divide: 86 percent of blacks say more needs to be done to achieve racial equality, compared with 53 percent of whites. However, the share of whites who see the need for change significantly increased from 39 percent a year earlier.

A growing share of Americans say that racism in society is a big problem. Half of Americans now say this, up from 33 percent five years earlier… Although whites were far less likely to say racism is a big problem (44 percent), the share of whites expressing this view has risen 17 percentage points since 2010… Most Americans gave police departments around the country relatively low marks in treating races equally.23

Hillary Clinton has been the beneficiary of the majority of black Democrat votes thus far, though Sanders narrowed the gap in Michigan. In part, this reflects her dominance in the South, but it also reflects the fact that the Clinton years saw “median household income in African-American households [gr0w] by 25 percent, twice as fast as it did for all households nationwide. In addition, African-American unemployment plummeted from 14.1 percent to 8.2 percent”.24 In part, the Clintons also enjoy the support of much of the black political class after making a number of high-powered black political appointments when Bill Clinton was in office. Disillusionment with Obama’s record has also contributed to a fading of political hopes among many black voters, and Trump’s racism has served to reinforce the “lesser evil” of Clinton as the candidate most likely to beat the Republicans. This latter assessment may well be inaccurate, however. Of seven polls in 2016 that considered which of the Democratic candidates would fare best against Trump, Sanders came top in six of them.25

The condition of the US working class

The question of racism in the 2016 election is a central one, but is itself complicated in various ways by that of class. Electoral polarisation in the US is a reflection—and a relatively pale one, given the numbers of Americans who remain disenfranchised, incarcerated or alienated from electoral politics—of economic, social and political processes that have been developing over four decades and more. The widening class divide, the mass destruction of jobs, the recession, bank bailouts, the erosion of working class communities and the betrayal by the political elite and its unwillingness to address any of the pressing concerns of its base are driving electoral polarisation. This is not taking place in a linear and ordered fashion, but—however distorted and misdirected (in the case of Trump supporters)—via tensions in the “base” of society that are putting pressure on the institutions that exist to maintain the status quo. Both parties are divided between the established party machine and “mavericks” who give voice to the concerns of the party membership and voters. The class conditions in the US are throwing up a range of responses that are hostile to the political class. Depending on geography, individual experience, levels of racism, political affiliation and a host of other identifications, some are being pulled behind Sanders and some behind Trump.

What is clear is that the disconnection between the political establishment and its working class constituencies is part of “a mounting sense that all the institutions presiding over our shaky mood of consensus—from the financial sector to the higher-education establishment to the mainstream media—are crumbling”. So, Republican voters

know that business as usual tasseled-loafer campaign conservatism in the Romney vein won’t produce an electoral majority, or lasting working class prosperity. Likewise, their Democratic counterparts, smarting from an Obama “change” platform that yielded no prosecutions of Wall Street malefactors in the wake of the 2008 meltdown, while racking up no less than three former investment bankers as White House chiefs of staff, understand that Hillary Clinton, who is assiduously courting major donors, and who looked blithely on as her husband embarked on our age’s most ruinous course of financial deregulation, is an unlikely tribune for the working class. You don’t have to sign on with the Trump and Sanders crusades in all their particulars to see that in today’s money-driven, elite-dominated political scene, more and more ordinary voters feel legitimately left out—and fed up.26

A Pew Research Center study found that middle-income households were no longer the country’s economic majority, and that the bulk of the nation’s “aggregate household income has substantially shifted from middle-income to upper-income households, driven by the growing size of the upper-income tier and more rapid gains in income at the top. Fully 49 percent of US aggregate income went to upper-income households in 2014, up from 29 percent in 1970.” Furthermore, “In 2014, the median income of these households was 4 percent less than in 2000. Moreover, because of the housing market crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-09, their median wealth (assets minus debts) fell by 28 percent from 2001 to 2013”.27

Economic pain has a direct result on individual suffering. A 2015 study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that between 1998 and 2013:

White Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy… Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America…and the least educated among them have fared the worst.28

As Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration and a Sanders supporter has put it, these disastrous economic realities have wreaked havoc on people’s lives, and are now doing the same to the political elite. “Something very big has happened, and it’s not due to Bernie Sanders’s magnetism or Donald Trump’s likability. It’s a rebellion against the establishment”.29

What is clear is that, whatever the eventual outcome of the campaign and whoever wins the presidency, there are deep faultlines in US society that cannot be papered over. A profound mistrust of government and institutions’ ability to mend lives that it has broken will continue to dominate US politics, and the eruption of questions of class, poverty, injustice and the possibility of a different way of organising the world into the electoral process will continue to reverberate, in some form. For the left, the staggering levels of support for an openly socialist candidate provide a fantastic opportunity to build on, broaden and unite activists involved in a range of social movements over support (however critical) for Sanders and opposition to Trump’s racism and, in the process, to gain a hearing for revolutionary ideas on a scale not experienced since Seattle.